**A powerful novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after
their lives are dramatically upended, from an award-winning author with
"a wonderfully original and limber voice" (The New York Times)
"[Nick Laird's] kinetic prose, full of insight about politics,
history and religion, dazzles eye and ear. -The New York Times Book
Review**
"Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in
gorgeous language...[with] fierce tenderness. " *-*Dave Eggers, author
of Heroes of the Frontier
Alison Donnelly has suffered for love. Still stuck in the small Northern
Irish town where she was born, working for her father's real estate
agency, she hopes a second marriage will help her get her life back
together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent professor who lives in
New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison's wedding, before
heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show
about the world's newest religion.
Both sisters hope to write their own futures, but the past has other
ideas. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new
husband has a past neither of them can escape. While Liz, in a
rainforest on the other side of the planet, finds herself increasingly
entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the charismatic
middle-aged woman she has come to film, the leader of a cargo cult.
As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison,
it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the
past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide exactly what the living
owe to the dead. Laird's brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies
and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the
repercussions of history and belief.
